Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/3] git-merge: Honor pre-merge hook

From: Michael Haggerty <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2012 17:30:06 +0200

On 09/05/2012 03:39 PM, Michael J Gruber wrote:
> git-merge does not honor the pre-commit hook when doing automatic merge
> commits, and for compatibility reasons this is going to stay.
> 
> Introduce a pre-merge hook which is called for an automatic merge commit
> just like pre-commit is called for a non-automatic merge commit (or any
> other commit).

What exactly is an "automatic merge commit"?  Is it any merge that
doesn't have a conflict?  A merge that doesn't invoke the editor?  A
merge done as part of another operation (e.g., pull)?  I don't see the
term mentioned in the git-merge or githooks man pages.

I think it would be good if you would define this term in the
documentation files that your patch touched, and perhaps in the githooks
section about "pre-commit" as well.

Secondly, though it is impossible (for backwards compatibility reasons)
for the pre-commit hook to be invoked for automatic merges, no such
considerations prohibit the pre-merge commit from being invoked for
non-automatic merges.  In other words, both hooks, pre-commit *and*
pre-merge, could be invoked for non-automatic merges.  Would this be
preferable?

It depends on what pre-merge scripts are likely to be used for.  If they
will tend to be used for merge-specific actions, then it might be more
convenient for *all* merges to be vetted by them.  On the other hand, if
they tend to do the same actions as pre-commit hooks, then having
non-automatic merge commits go through both hooks would tend to be more
annoying than helpful.  Specifically, one of the scripts would probably
have to check whether the merge is a non-automatic merge, and if so do
nothing (i.e., letting the other script take care of it).  This would
also require an easy way for a script to determine whether a commit is a
non-automatic merge commit.

Have you considered this?

Michael

-- 
Michael Haggerty
[email-masked]
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/